Hi friends, happy Monday! I hope you’re doing well. Today I’m posting my review of Leni Zumas’ novel Red Clocks.

Red Clocks by: Leni Zumas: This novel follows four women, in a small town, each with their own struggle that centers around the reproductive rights of women. Ro is a forty-three-year-old, single, woman who is trying desperately to get pregnant. Susan is a stay at home mom to two children, living in a marriage that never should have started. Mattie is an adopted daughter, who now finds herself pregnant and nowhere to turn. And Gin, an older woman who’s known for her ‘home remedies’. Slowly each of these women’s story start to interweave as they face similar and different struggles. This was a very politically charged novel about the reproductive rights of women. Each woman in this book had some form of conflict relating to that topic and the reader could see where the author was trying to go with this, but sometimes it didn’t always work out that way. First off, the confusion of not knowing the characters’ names was jarring and confusing. The reader couldn’t understand why the author felt the need to keep their names hidden. The only time a character was addressed by their name was in someone else’s point of view, it was really strange and made it very disjointed to read about. The other thing was that Zumas made her characters really strong in the sense that they were so strong in their own beliefs that they couldn’t see another side to the story. They did mellow out by the end a bit, but they came off as very drastic to start. Also, none of the men in this ever came off as good; there was not one single good guy in this, which kind of made this read as a women hate men read and that’s also off-putting. Any time the reader had to read from the wife’s perspective, Susan, they cringed at how bad the husband was. The reader got the point the author was trying to make, but the reader wishes there was a way to go about it without going to the extreme and hitting us over the head with it. This was very fast-paced, which the reader liked, but it was so fast-paced that this just ended without them realizing it. They got to the last page, not realizing it was over. The reader felt that three of the four characters got a justified ending. One character, which is also where the book ended, just felt like she gave up; after a whole novel of her fighting for the thing she wanted, this novel ended and she all of a sudden didn’t want it anymore, felt off and out of character. In the end, this had good concepts, they just weren’t executed the best, especially in a world where it’s a reality and not a dystopian place where Roe vs. Wade has been overturned.